Monday, February 25, 2013

Whether or not you appreciate the voxel aesthetic of Minecraft, Mojang's wildly popular gathering/building game, it's undeniable that there is a tremendous amount of amazing work being produced by its community. Between builds, mods, and texture packs, there's no shortage of amazing creative work going on in this building-block world. Case in point: MrShortee's BladeCraft, a combination map and texture pack designed to recreate the world of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. What almost as impressive as the textures and the map are the machinima that MrShortee's made to advertise them, which capture the atmosphere of their source amazingly well. Check 'em out:

Redgrave (an incredibly popular avatar fashion brand in Second Life) recently shared a pretty impressive clip on their Facebook page, where they often share previews of their upcoming releases. It's an animated mesh head, and it animates much more dramatically than others we've seen so far, and it may even conform to your avatar's facial shape. As interesting and technically impressive as it is, I can't decide if it's stumbled a little too deep into the uncanny valley or not for my tastes. Take a look for yourself:

Friday, February 22, 2013

Cieran Laval noticed that Linden Lab is displaying Google AdSense streams on its Second Life website. With about 300-400,000 unique monthly visitors, that's likely to earn the company income in the four to five figure range in US$ -- pocket change, by corporate standards -- at the expense of diluting the SL experience with contextual real life ads for banks, travel agencies, and what have you. A lot of SLers are irked for understandable and not so understandable reasons, which is to be expected, but there is a way Linden Lab can make their AdSense less annoying, while still bringing in new revenue:

Speaking of hunts in Second Life, NWN partner Second Ads has a game called Fish Hunt, which as you may have guessed, involves fishing for virtual sea life, with a cool (in my biased opinion) hook: Players can exchange the fish they catch for Linden Dollars. In-world merchants and sim owners can host this game on their land to attract visitors (hosted fishing spots are listing on this site here), while SLers can play the game to earn some spending money while hanging out and chatting with fellow players, and exploring the world's oceans, rivers, and ponds. (You know, pretty much most the reasons people like actual fishing.)

The criticism that's been leveled against Ed Key and David Kanaga's retro, artistic, musical exploration game Proteus since its release a few weeks ago probably sounds all too familiar to fans of Second Life (who account for a significant chunk of NWN's audience.) The friendlier discussions are full of questions like "what are you supposed to do", "where do you go" and "isn't this boring" while others have even compared it to a screensaver, or refused to think of it as a game at all.

This is why, even though Hamlet briefly covered Proteus earlier this month, I felt compelled to return to it for a much more in-depth look. Surely if any one community could understand and agree on what makes Proteus so special, it would be ours.

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Since launching last week, Linden Lab's interactive fiction app Versu has been performing somewhat well on the iOS charts, hitting the market at rank 15 in the Books (?) category, then falling to below rank 30. That's according to App Annie, and given that there are hundreds of thousands of apps in Apple's Store, that's not too bad a performance for downloads. (At a semi-educated guess, I'd say this performance translates to total downloads in the five figure range.) However, App Annie also notes its performance for Grossing revenue, through in-app payments, and that's less great news: Starting at rank 288, then falling to 387. That suggests very few people who download the app are buying the additional $4.99 story through an in-app purchase.

In her review of Versu, Iris mentioned that the number of products Linden Lab has been rapidly releasing in the last couple quarters conveyed the impression that they were throwing things at the wall in the hope they'd stick. Whether that's accurate or not, it seems true that Versu and Creatorverse, Linden Lab's other iOS app, are not (so far) sticking:

The thing about the Harlem Shake hitting Second Life is, when you see it performed by a raccoon, a succubus, a Gangnam Style-ing PSY, and a giant, pelvic-thrusting banana, you're kind of like, "Well, that's pretty good, but couldn't this be just a little bit weirder?"

Even though I wanted to keep this week's installment of Sim Downton Abbey (find the first and second installments here and here respectively) light for people recovering from the last episode, it was as plagued with problems as ever. Between the dramatic characters, my own technical issues in running the massive main house, and all the different ways that the game itself seems to want to sabotage me. I'm still haunted by my inability to purge all Supernatural elements from the neighbourhood, leaving Matthew to use the offbrand tardis network set up in town to arrive promptly for his dates with Mary and forcing Mary herself to defend her family against vicious bistro-loving werewolves.

This event was planned and held within five weeks. The people behind it (and there were over a hundred and thirty people involved in the event) were experienced event organizers in Second Life (events including Second Life Birthdays, Relay for Life etc etc). This was short notice for a wholly new event, but a blog was set up, a Facebook page and a Twitter stream. It received publicity through the real world OBR event as well - and even featured on the Guardian newspaper's live blog of One Billion Rising!

There were four sims open for twenty-four hours, with people coming and going all day long. On average, I'd say there were 120 people at the event at any one time - attendance might have dropped to 80 at some points, and rose to nearly 200 at peak times - at which point the sims were really groaning. I would suspect that well over a thousand people visited the event in the course of the day - and more watched on Livestream - it was broadcast for the whole 24 hours.

And we got nearly five thousand hits on the OBR blog on the day itself - so maybe I'm being conservative with visitor numbers.